Amazon’s December 10, 2011 price check app promotion caused quite a stir in the book industry. Though books were not actually included in the price check, which gave consumers up to $15 in discounts to those who scanned prices of products at bricks and mortar stores, the book industry took offense. Indie bookstores were outraged, claiming that the retail giant had gone too far. (For more information, check out the PW article here.)

As part of the indie bookstore backlash, some stores urged consumers to use Amazon’s Look Inside feature to browse the book and then buy the book in the store. It came down to a match between “look here, buy here” versus “look in stores, buy online” versus “look online, buy in stores.”

Who can win in such a match? The publisher, that’s who. Did you notice the key word in each of these situations? It is “buy,” and it is all about getting your product in front of your consumers in as many ways possible so that when they are ready to pull the trigger and whip out the wallet (physical or virtual), they have all the information they want or need to make your book their book of choice.

To stay on top of the game and continue to offer innovate book promotion solutions, Bookmasters has collaborated with Book2Look to give our publishing partners a viral marketing tool to take print and eBook promotion to the next level with the Book2Look Social Media Widget. Click here to see the widget at work.

The widget is designed to promote your book/s on websites, blogs, social media sites, and within eAdvertising. With the widget, consumers can look here, buy here (through the AtlasBooks.com store), or from within the widget, they can look here and buy at any number of online retailers that you choose to display. And while we’re at it, for print books, consumers can look here, buy here or get hooked on the book, and buy in their favorite store, wherever that may be.

The widget takes look here, buy…wherever, to another extreme by expanding what it means to “look here.” You can embed the widget on your website, blog, social media, and ads, or the widget can go viral, and then you have other people doing your promotion for you through their websites, blogs, etc. Your discoverability has just grown exponentially.

Here are some of the option features you can build into your widget:

Portable description with an excerpt chapter
Video trailer and a photo gallery
Zoom and social bookmarking options
Recommend and share features
Review, rate, and comment capabilities
Shopping cart to multiple eRetail sites
Option to embed into other sites
Detailed analytics
And more!

For more information about how you can use the widget to sell more books, contact your account executive or call 1.800.537.6727.